I am sorry to announce today that Mitsuaki Nozaki of KEK is stepping down as our Regional Director for Asia, while at the same time I am pleased to announce the appointment of Kaoru Yokoya, also of KEK, as our new Regional Director. The organisational structure of the GDE as mandated by the ILCSC and ICFA is based on rough parity in a partnership between our three regions: Asia, the Americas and Europe. Each region is represented by a Regional Director, who is part of the global GDE directorate, and also serves as the link between the GDE and regional partners.

Kaoru Yokoya, new ILC-GDE Regional Director for Asia

Mitsuaki Nozaki has to step down because of his responsibilities at KEK are getting wider

The role of Regional Director is difficult to define because its function is so very different in the three regions. In Asia, the Regional Director is responsible for nurturing and helping make sure the large Japanese effort is well integrated into the global R&D efforts and priorities. The second big responsibility and challenge is to help develop collaborations and effective programmes in an emerging and broader Asian collaboration involving China, India and Korea.

Kaoru Yokoya is especially well qualified to carry out the duties of the Regional Director for Asia. An accelerator physicist who has been involved in the linear collider effort for many years, he is very knowledgeable about ILC design and technical details, as well as resource issues. Kaoru has served on the ILC Executive Committee from its inception, and his steady and insightful contributions were crucial to our completing a successful Reference Design last year. I expect he will be just as important in the execution of the Technical Design Phase, and I am also hopeful he will be able to stimulate the growth and integration of the broader Asian ILC programme.

Mitsuaki Nozaki of KEK served as our Regional Director since March 2006. Mitsuaki has been doing double duty by also serving as a deputy director for the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Science (IPNS) at KEK during that period. Recently, his responsibilities as deputy director at KEK have significantly increased, which is the reason why he must now step down as Regional Director.

During his tenure as Regional Director, Mitsuaki has also served as a Japanese representative to the Funding Agencies for Large Colliders (FALC) meetings and to the FALC Resource Group (FALC RG). In that capacity, he helped formulate terms of reference for FALC that defines the raison d'etre of that important informal organisation. Perhaps even more significantly for the GDE, he has worked with the FALC RG to implement our Common Fund that is so important to the functioning of the GDE.

I want to thank Mitsuaki for his work as Regional Director, and wish him the best in his new responsibilities. He assures me he is committed to the ILC and will continue to further the project and energetically work for us in his new capacity. Thank you, Mitsuaki.

As we have entered into the Technical Design Phase, we have instituted a more traditional task-oriented project management structure within the GDE. The new phase involves more global collaboration, coordination and prioritising, which presents many challenges, including making best use of regional and laboratory resources. I am confident that Kaoru will be very effective at developing and integrating the Asian programme into our increasingly task-oriented program. Welcome to this new job, Kaoru.

Stop press: I have just received very good news from Jie Gao at IHEP, China, of the approval of ~1.5 million Euros for ILC-related SCRF developments in China (see the Image of the Week in this issue). It is great to see that SCRF expertise for the ILC is really spreading around the world.